Numerous electronic technologies such as digital computers, calculators, audio devices, video equipment, and telephone systems facilitate increased productivity and reduce costs in analyzing and communicating data in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. The systems typically involve communication of vast amounts of video information over communication networks in which bandwidth is limited. Conventional communication approaches frequently attempt to reduce or compress information through various coding schemes. However, traditional coding scheme attempts can be limited and problematic (e.g., attempts at special effects, etc.).
While conventional attempts at video and communication coding may reduce the amount of information conveyed over the network, they usually introduce significant processing overhead. Processing overhead can involve or occupy a significant amount of processing resources and thereby impact performance. Some schemes attempt to encode/decode frames in video streams and usually involve information from previous frames to encode/decode subsequent frames. Traditional attempts at changing from one video stream to another video stream usually involve performing coding operations again at a beginning or defined point of the new stream. These approaches can be problematic.
Video streaming over the internet is popular in recent years. Various internet streaming protocols (e.g., HTTP, etc.) take advantage of existing Internet infrastructure and often easily penetrate NAT and firewalls. However, conventional video streaming usually has strict bandwidth and delay requirements that make guaranteed quality of service (QoS) for streaming over a public Internet very challenging as network conditions often change constantly. For certain video streaming applications, such as sports, entertainment performances, tele-medicine and remote education, people may be interested in special effects such as freezing (e.g., bullet time, etc.) and sweeping. However, achieving special effects over the Internet is challenging. Various attempts at adaptive streaming technologies have been proposed (e.g., including Apple HTTP live streaming (HLS), Microsoft smooth streaming, etc), however existing adaptive streaming approaches or attempts (e.g., such as HTTP Live Streaming, Smooth Streaming, and DASH, etc.) do not typically provide specified special effects in their schemes.